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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A Desert In Disguise: The Resilience Of The Nebraska Sandhills, Jeff Hartman
A Desert In Disguise: The Resilience Of The Nebraska Sandhills, Jeff Hartman
School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The Nebraska Sandhills are the largest sand dune system in the Western Hemisphere, and are unique because they remain relatively undisturbed from row crop agriculture. Research in the past two decades demonstrated that the Sandhills are dynamic on millennial timescales, switching between stabilized, vegetated states to non-vegetated, mobilized states. The Sandhills are currently stabilized, but understanding how ecological processes are altered as sand dunes transition from stabilized to mobilized states, provides insight into the thresholds, stability, and resilience of this grassland ecosystem. My research investigated the impacts of vegetation disturbances on ecological processes and the sand dune surface stability. For …
The Effect Of Disturbance And Freshwater Availability On Lower Florida Keys’ Coastal Forest Dynamics, Danielle E. Ogurcak
The Effect Of Disturbance And Freshwater Availability On Lower Florida Keys’ Coastal Forest Dynamics, Danielle E. Ogurcak
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Coastal forest retreat in the Florida Keys during the 20th century has been attributed to a combination of sea level rise and hurricane storm surge impacts, but the interactions between these two disturbances leading to forest decline are not well understood. The goal of my research was to assess their effects over a period spanning more than two decades, and to examine the relationships between these press and pulse disturbances and freshwater availability in pine rockland, hardwood hammock, and supratidal scrub communities. Impacts and recovery from two storm surges, Hurricanes Georges (1998) and Wilma (2005), were assessed with satellite-derived …